“How do we get out of this, Rachel?” Wick said after a moment. “I can’t see how to get out of this. Anymore.”
“Keep fortifying the Balcony Cliffs. Wait things out,” I said.
I didn’t have any more traps and the only other plan I could think of in the aftershock of watching Mord attack the Company was for someone to come along to save us. But no one would ever come along to save us.
We held each other for a time in that hideaway, that unexpected sanctuary, while the city smoldered and the world went on changing without us.
HOW I TRIED TO COPE
Although we did not know if the Magician was dead or alive, chief among our ills now seemed Mord’s proxies, reeling across the city in the aftermath of the missile attack. I had so many terrible dreams connected to the proxies, terrible thoughts, in those times, and couldn’t distinguish which were mine and which were imposed from some other source. For that’s the way I felt: that I was not entirely myself. It seemed for a time that the Mord proxies forced all action and everything came out of their machinations. Even Borne’s rejection of my books became part of the proxies’ plan, because I had lost my mind. I was haunted by dreams of the proxies in which they now flew as well, and that the space in the roof above the swimming pool had opened up into a yawning chasm and the Mord proxies had swooped down into that space to talk to Wick, and that Wick plotted with the proxies to take over the Balcony Cliffs from me and Borne.
Drunk-stumbling in their own blood-murder, Mord proxies growled from fang-filled snouts a language that none had ever heard before, articulated even as they slaughtered, thoughts and desires that had never been expressed in the city, that were beyond even Mord. From the entrails left behind we tried in vain to divine what they meant, what sense could be made of … any of it.
Mord had never spoken except to roar or rage, had said no intelligible word. Yet these emissaries in his image—breaking down walls, smashing through doors to get to the live flesh-meat beyond—they spoke continually. They would not or could not stop speaking. Sometimes muttered. Sometimes huffed out or choral, together, from deep in their throats. We knew of their passage through the world by this entangled, glottal speech that we could not interpret. No translation existed, and there was no intermediary to explain. So since we could not understand anything but their actions, we resolved to snuff out these proxies, to halt their stream of speech as they desired to halt our own, did not care what phase in Mord’s rough dominion they might mark.
But, mostly, we hid from them, avoided them, tried not to be killed by them. We disguised our scent, disguised our home even more. Ventured out less. With most of his clients dead or gone into hiding, it took little to convince Wick to remain behind our barricades.
During this time, I would wake in the middle of the night, startled from sleep, with the memory of Mord’s giant carious eye, shining like an evil sun, replacing the real sun, and shining over my bed, only to find Borne instead, watching me, in need of comfort I believed, of someone to talk to.
I gave Borne what I had to give, even when exhausted, because I never wanted to lose track of him again. I feared that more than anything. I feared that he would slowly merge with the background, as the background became my primary concern: to shore up walls, to place a new barricade at the end of a corridor I now thought might be a security risk, and a pit below. We were afraid of people coming up on us from below, having seen the feral children pop up out of their lair. We could hear sometimes a lazy inquiry, a random digging here and then there that I thought must be the Mord proxies, perhaps even at rest, not giving a second thought to the likes of us. But not for long, not for long, Wick thought.
During Borne’s visits, he would be in what he called travel mode about half the time, and he glowed a deep icy blue flecked with patches of gold that created star-shaped patterns on the wall. My fireflies had fallen below a level he deemed acceptable. His eyes were only two in number in that mode and had an odd intensity to them.
Sometimes Borne would adopt a kind of a new “bloat” position that made him look like a huge, fleshy eggplant on its side, his tentacles pulled down over his torso to provide stability. But, with more and more frequency, Borne would also change shape and color so often during a visit that it was hard to look at him, as if there were some things the human eye was not adapted to see. I didn’t know if he was losing control of himself or entering some new phase.
I learned not to mind that he just appeared inside my apartment, even though I had to make an appointment to visit him. Even if he’d surprised me untying my shoes after a long day or walking around in my underwear. We couldn’t afford to use biotech to secure our apartment doors anymore; there was nothing that valuable for Borne to eat.
“How was it out there?” I would ask, rather than, “Why, why were you out there again?” Yet he always came back unscathed. Yet he always told me about his day, or some version of it.
“What happened in this city?” Borne asked once, in a voice like a world-weary old man.
I had no answer for him, thinking: I don’t know, it just happened. Everything everywhere collapsed. We didn’t try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline. We didn’t try the right things at the right time. We cared but we didn’t do. Too many people, too little space. Weighted down, unable to see the way Borne saw. Maybe the Mord proxies weren’t an aberration but the end product of it all.
“It’s dead. It’s all in ruins. Everyone is … defeated.”
I know a responsible parent would have pushed back, told him that wasn’t true. But I’d had yet another hard day on the back of several more, with little sleep, and I couldn’t help but laugh, scathing, at that. So he’d finally noticed. Some petty part of me rejoiced that he was becoming more like us. Or more like me in that moment.
“That’s just the way it is, Borne. Survival isn’t pretty. We’re trying to survive. Do you know what I mean?” An honest question. Despite my worries, Borne seemed to have it easier than we did in some ways. We could starve away in the Balcony Cliffs and he’d just absorb a chair or something to keep on living.
“Yes, I know what you mean,” he said impatiently. “But it doesn’t need to be this way.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” I meant that almost as a joke, or a provocation, but I must admit I was curious.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Let me know when you’ve figured it out.”
“I met an old man today. He was digging a hole.”
“Yes?”
“He was digging a hole and talking to me.”
“Did he notice what you looked like?” And had he been real or a character in a book?
“No. But he told me he wasn’t from here.”
“No surprise there.” Hardly anyone over thirty was from here.